20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS
The bass player’s real and the drummer’s real for Eliot Lipp’s new band
Eliot Lipp is standing in front of Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where he’s enjoying some hours off from a tour that might never end – there’s an empty bed he pays rent on in Brooklyn, and he misses waking up in it for more than two mornings in a row – and where he has to talk very quietly and politely if he has to do an interview. So he slips outside where he can be loud and curse if enthusiasm warrants. He has a full new band now. It might happen.
The Washington native and one-time Angeleno – in fact, the one-time roommate of rapper Subtitle, whose collaborations outline a whole moment in independent local hip-hop – was first pulled into the outside world four years ago by Prefuse 73, who signed Lipp to his label Eastern Developments and publicly released the bedroom-produced demo that Lipp sent him in the mail. From then, it was Lipp, a laptop and a supporting cast of analog synthesizers pursuing grace through weightlessness across several albums of microscopically detailed pop electronics. But right now it becomes Lipp Service, which are hand-picked Lipp selections lifted high by live bass and drums. Eliot Comes Alive? “It’s just the beginning,” says Lipp. “We’re starting a band!”
Lipp Service are babies together, formed barely a year ago after an after-party for the Gem and Mineral Show in Tucson, Arizona, a mandatory global destination for another kind of rock fan. (“I kept calling [gems] ‘rocks’ and everybody got all mad at me!” says Lipp.) Lipp was roomed next to bassist Alex Botwin and drummer Lane Shaw from the noted Pnuma Trio, kids originally from Memphis who’d put live remixes of Madlib songs alongside their own instrumental keys-synth-drums hip-hop beats. (Brand New Heavies for the post-Dilla generation?) Pyramiding late-night plans made Lipp fly out to meet them in Colorado to reassemble his songs. He wiped his programmed rhythm section off the laptop and presented them the open range.
It’s been a long time since he started a band, says Lipp now – that was high school in Washington and punk rock, and in between came years of solo control. His subsequent work was vocoder and Moroder (as presented to cheerfully uneasy effect on “Beamrider,” lead single from Lipp’s upcoming Peace Love Weed 3D on Old Tacoma) and bedrock breaks hacked into new silhouettes by one man and one super-computer looking for Planet Rock instead of a Space Odyssey. He’s still learning how exactly the band works: “After producing so much, I got a studio head now,” he says now. “I want everything so polished. I’m trying to bring it back – make it more raw. Try and approach with more of a punk sort of vibe. After so many years twisting knobs, it’s hard to get back in that mode.”
No official releases for Lipp Service are out yet or scheduled; in fact, this will be the trio’s first-ever Los Angeles show. But Lipp finds encouraging precedent in the jazz and combustible fusion of the ’70s: “Jazz is one thing I don’t ever lose interest in,” he says. “Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and synth-y hi-fi weirdo shit – early Weather Report, Chick Corea. And funky shit – Ramsey Lewis, Lonnie Liston Smith. The spaced-out shit I love. I can’t ever see myself not loving those records.”
And with Botwin and Shaw flanking, Lipp discovers new energy in his instrumentals. (A live-but-sounds-studio track is available online.) Although there’s enough plot development in his songs to suggest filmscapes that never existed, what Lipp hopes to focus and control instead is emotion and mood, he says. Now he has reinforcements.
“There’s no political element to the song,” he says about his instrumentals. “Not political like ‘Obama’ or something – there’s just no face to it. You don’t put subject matter to the mood. If you’re listening to a track where the music is in a certain mood, you’re gonna listen to what the dude is talking about and respond to that. ‘Oh, I’m supposed to feel bad.’ But the mood I’ll try to create you can apply to whatever you want. You can use your imagination – put it into your life.”
Low End Theory presents Lipp Service with Alex B and Bass Science, plus DJs Daddy Kev, Gaslamp Killer, Nobody and D-Style, with Nocando and Mear One at the Airliner, 2419 N. Broadway, downtown L.A. Wed., 10 p.m., $5-10, 18+, Lowendtheoryclub.com.
Published: 01/08/2009
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